In many respects, the recent meeting in Chicago of the National Abortion Federation (NAF), the major professional association of abortion providers in North America, looked like any other medical gathering. Participants wearing name tags attended workshops, engaged in lively debate about medical innovations in their field, examined the exhibits set up by vendors and greeted old friends and colleagues.

But in other ways this was not a typical medical conference. Security was tight, with guards checking registration badges and conferring on walkie-talkies. Along with presentations on "Vaginal Ultrasound Assessment" and "Monitoring Chorionic Gonadotropin Levels After Mifepristone Abortion" were sessions on "Ensuring the Rights of Minors: Making Your Judicial Bypass Work" and "Understanding FACE (Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances) and How to Invoke Its Protection." One of the keynote speakers was an FBI agent who played a key role in the apprehension of James Kopp, the fugitive accused of murdering Dr. Barnett Slepian, an abortion provider in Buffalo, New York, in 1998, and of wounding several other physicians.

While NAF meetings always display this surreal combination of conventional medical components and vivid reminders that abortion is the most politicized--and besieged--branch of medicine in the country, this year the atmosphere was especially tense. The fact that the reliably prochoice Clinton-Gore team is gone, replaced by an Administration that is deeply, and cleverly, hostile to abortion, seemed to hover over every conversation. As abortion providers well know, even if Roe v. Wade is not overturned, abortion access can be eviscerated by its enemies. Here are just some of the Bush Administration's initial steps in that direction:

§ As Attorney General, John Ashcroft, one of the most fanatically antiabortion senators in history, is charged with protecting the safety of abortion providers and patients. Despite repeated assertions at his confirmation hearings that he accepts Roe as "settled law," no one expects him to continue with the forceful and active steps that his predecessor, Janet Reno, took to combat antiabortion terrorism. Ashcroft will also play a key role in judicial appointments. While public attention has inevitably focused on the Supreme Court, judges appointed to lower federal courts have an enormous impact on abortion provision, ruling in such diverse areas as waiting periods, legislatively mandated scripted counseling for abortion patients, interpretations of permissible buffer zones outside clinics (areas that may be kept free of protesters) and on any revisitation of "partial birth" abortion bans.

§ Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson sent chills down the NAF community's collective spine when he announced at his confirmation hearings that he would call for a "review" of the FDA's approval last fall of the "abortion pill," RU-486 (mifepristone). Also, antiabortion Congressmen have introduced the Patient Health and Safety Act (PHSA), a bill that seeks to restrict distribution of the drug by prohibiting anyone other than physicians who provide surgical abortions from dispensing it, thereby thwarting its promise to improve access in underserved areas. Thompson's threatened "review" would likely do the same.

For now, Thompson appears to be holding off on such a review. The Administration has not yet named an FDA commissioner, most likely because of the hot-button politics of mifepristone approval. And it is not clear whether the PHSA will pass the Senate. But uncertainty over the fate of this drug is hampering the campaign to disseminate it. Prospective abortion pill providers face a host of other challenges as well: arranging malpractice insurance and managed care reimbursement, conforming to legal requirements (parental notification, waiting periods, etc.). As a result, nearly all those currently offering the drug are surgical providers.

§ The Unborn Victims of Violence Act, passed by the House on April 26, makes it a federal crime to injure or kill the fetus of a pregnant woman. Even though the act specifically exempts abortion, the prochoice community widely views it as a crucial first step in a campaign by abortion opponents to secure the status of "personhood" for the fetus (and indeed, embryos and blastocysts). As one lawyer at the NAF meeting told me, "Fertilized cells will have the same legal status as a woman, and eventually this will threaten various forms of birth control as well as abortion." George W. Bush has voiced his eagerness to sign the bill into law.

And what of the Supreme Court? Amid the rumors of the possible retirement of one or more Justices this summer, the stakes are high for abortion providers--and for Bush as well. Given the public's split on the issue, Bush risks alienating a sizable number of voters no matter what he does. (Despite people's discomfort with abortion, polls show that a majority wants to see Roe stand.) One likely scenario is that Bush will nominate a "stealth" antichoicer--one with no paper trail on abortion--and then try to prevent an abortion case from reaching the Court before the 2004 election.

How can the abortion rights movement respond? Lucinda Finley, a law professor at SUNY, Buffalo, says, "The movement must convince senators to announce that they will not confirm someone who is unwilling to state his or her position on Roe." The Feminist Majority urges a filibuster against any nominee not committed to preserving Roe (see www.million4Roe.com). Whether prochoicers have such political capital remains to be seen. The recent abortion rights march in Washington, whose timing unfortunately conflicted with Earth Day and Quebec demonstrations as well as the NAF meeting itself, attracted a disappointing turnout and almost no media attention.

As the rest of the movement awaits the Court showdown, abortion providers continue to endure countless hassles just to open the doors of their clinics each day. Many states have imposed TRAP--"targeted restrictions against abortion providers"--laws consisting of cumbersome rules, directed only at abortion facilities, regulating such matters as door width and air flow. Even those in states without TRAP laws face constant battles with landlords who try to evict them, vendors under pressure not to service them and frequent threats of violence. The community of providers, which has shown an extraordinary ability to carry on its work with humor and bravery even in such unacceptable circumstances, is gearing up for a long fight.

The arrest in France of James Kopp, the accused assassin of Buffalo obstetrician Barnett Slepian, could not have come at a more awkward time for the Bush Administration. Bush inaugurates himself by blocking aid to international family planning agencies and by nominating antiabortion fanatics to run the Justice Department. Then fugitive Kopp surfaces to remind the American public of where
these bottom-line commitments lead.

In 1994 Bill Clinton's Justice Department initiated a grand jury inquiry into
abortion-clinic violence. But FBI agents grumbled that Justice was
wasting their time, and the grand jury folded its tent in January of
1996 after finding no evidence of a national conspiracy. Five years
later, it's clear that Kopp--accused in three nonfatal shootings in
Canada and the United States in addition to the murder of Dr.
Slepian--had a lot of help, the kind of help for which "conspiracy"
is the operative legal term.

So far, investigators have
arrested two antiabortion felons in Brooklyn--Dennis Malvasi,
convicted of a 1987 clinic bombing in Manhattan, and Loretta Marra,
who blockaded clinics with Kopp. They sent Kopp money and stayed in
touch with him through a Yahoo drop box. The circle is almost
certainly wider--and transnational. For the past year Kopp lived in
Ireland, bunking in hostels and mingling with the fundamentalist
breakaway Catholic sect founded by excommunicated Archbishop Marcel
Lefebvre. Kopp managed to acquire at least two separate Irish
identities and passports for himself and a blank Irish passport and
birth certificates for his New York friends, and someone in Ireland
vouched for his references for an employment agency--all of which
makes it obvious that his was not a solo act. Ireland's right-to-life
leaders deny any connection to the assassin, and it's entirely
possible that his support network was American. In the last
half-decade US antiabortion campaigners have moved on Ireland in a
big way, introducing a militancy previously unknown
there.

Speculation necessarily swirls around the followers
of the Rev. Patrick Mahoney of the Washington-based Christian Defense
Coalition. In March 1999 Mahoney led a brigade of forty Americans to
Dublin, where they occupied the offices of the Irish Family Planning
Association and taught their Irish counterparts all-American
blockade-and-intimidation techniques. Indeed, only a day before
Kopp's arrest, Mahoney was slapped with an Irish court injunction
prohibiting him from further harassing the IFPA. Mahoney had tolerant
words in 1997 after Slepian's shooting, and responded to Kopp's
arrest by warning the Bush Administration not to "harass and
intimidate the pro-life movement."

It can't escape notice
that the Kopp conspiracy began to unravel just as the Court of
Appeals for the Ninth Circuit overturned a jury verdict and
injunction on the Nuremberg Files website, which displays
photos of abortion providers and a list with a strike through the
names of assassinated physicians. On March 28 the Ninth Circuit
unanimously found, in the words of presiding Judge Alex Kozinski,
that if the website's rhetoric "merely encouraged unrelated
terrorists," it is protected by the First Amendment.

Kate
Michelman of NARAL called the ruling "a major setback for a woman's
right to choice," and along with Planned Parenthood vowed to pursue
the case to the Supreme Court. To me, Kopp's overdue arrest suggests
a different conclusion. There can be no doubt that the Nuremberg
Files website contributed to a climate of fear--that the website
is the theory and James Kopp's rifle is the practice. Yet the
emerging facts of Kopp's flight make it clear that keeping The
Nuremberg Files off the Internet would not have saved Dr. Slepian
or brought the shooter to justice. The important thing is to
investigate real antichoice gangsterism, real shootings, real escape
routes. The important thing is to insist on the continuity between
Kopp and the "respectable" antiabortion agenda of the White House.
Bush and Ashcroft have been assiduously working to accomplish by
executive order what Kopp attempted with a gun: diminishing the
availability of abortion and thus undermining a civil right. This,
and the climate of fear generated by clinic violence, must be fought
with politics, not censorship. And the recent rise of police
surveillance aimed at antiglobalization protesters only makes more
clear the danger of prosecuting an inflammatory publication as if it
were the hand that smashed the windowpane or pulled the
trigger.

Kopp's arrest is full of ironies. The most
antichoice Attorney General in US history is now stuck prosecuting an
antichoice assassin; an Administration wild about the death penalty
must forgo capital punishment to secure Kopp's extradition because
France opposes it. It would be a final, and tragic, irony if
prochoice advocates permit antiabortion thugs like Mahoney to play
the martyr--drawing attention away from the very violence they have
nurtured.

The election this March of an openly gay Mayor of Paris--the Socialist Bertrand Delanoë--would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. That's one reason the American edition of Frédéric Martel's The Pink and the Black (it appeared in France five years ago) is so pertinent: It's the first attempt at a history of the modern French gay movement, without whose achievements the victory of Delanoë would not have been possible. It all began on March 10, 1971. Radio star Ménie Grégoire was moderating her enormously popular chat show before a live audience in Paris's famous Salle Playel. The broadcast's theme that day: "That Painful Problem, Homosexuality," with experts from law, medicine and the Catholic Church. Suddenly interrupting some priestly condescensions, a group of homosexual women rose from the audience, yelling, "It's not true, we're not suffering! Down with the heterocops!" The lesbians stormed the stage, and the control room cut off the microphones and switched to recorded music. The militants' message: "Homosexuals are sick of being a painful problem." The Front Homosexuel d'Action Révolutionnaire (FHAR), and with it the modern French gay movement, had been born.

The youthful activists who formed the FHAR had their political coming-of-age in the turbulent student-left rebellion of May 1968 that turned into a nationwide general strike in all walks of life, a gigantic outpouring of social protest against the suffocating atmosphere of de Gaulle's France. And while the young far-left soixante-huitards ('68ers) were initially hostile to "supposedly bourgeois homosexuality," as Martel writes, the May rebellion "contained, in embryo, all the ingredients of sexual liberation, for which it was a dress rehearsal." While the FHAR was initiated by women, it quickly admitted men as "objective allies."

One of the first men to join the FHAR was Guy Hocquenghem, who rapidly became the nascent movement's undisputed star. Hocquenghem's political itinerary was fairly typical of the soixante-huitards. After an "apprenticeship" in the Union of Communist Students when he was a brilliant philosophy student at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure in Paris, he was a leader of the National Union of French Students and--rejecting the heavy-handed Stalinism of the French Communist Party--became by turns a Trotskyist and then a Maoist. By the time of the FHAR's founding he was a prominent member of Vive la Révolution (VLR), a libertarian split-off from the orthodox Maoists that was led by Roland Castro (later a prominent architect and adviser to French President François Mitterrand on urbanism).

After joining the FHAR, Hocquenghem proposed that it put together a special issue of Tout!, the VLR's newspaper, which he coordinated. In the issue, 50,000 copies of which were published in April 1971, were articles titled "Our Bodies Do Belong to Us," "The Right to Homosexuality and Every Sort of Sexuality," "The Right of Minors to Freedom of Desire and Its Satisfactions" and, most important, "Let's Stop Cowering in the Corner." Martel records that "thus the theme of coming out appeared for the first time in France.... The FHAR, 'a saw for cutting up reality in a different way,' in Hocquenghem's expression, had found its slogan."

All this became a public scandal when the Interior Minister had Jean-Paul Sartre, who had lent his name to Tout! as editorial director, indicted for "public indecency" and "pornography"; police seized 10,000 copies of Tout! and the vice squad raided its offices. In the end Sartre, and the gay liberationists, won in court, a stunning victory against the justice system.

The FHAR's general meetings, held in the amphitheater of the École des Beaux Arts, grew rapidly from fifty people to a hundred, to a thousand, and they "marked a momentous time in the history of the evolution of mores in France. They got homosexuals talking," Martel writes. In this heady atmosphere, its air perfumed by hashish smoke, the "militants put revolution into practice: they invented cruising relieved of its furtiveness, and, moving through [the school's] hallways...or on the upper floors and in the attic, they experimented with Fourier's 36,000 forms of love."

In January 1972 Hocquenghem, by then teaching philosophy at the University of Vincennes and already moving away from VLR, published a historic and much-discussed article--"The Revolution of Homosexuals"--an autobiography-cum-manifesto in Le Nouvel Observateur, the influential mass-circulation left-wing weekly; and by the end of the year he'd produced Homosexual Desire, the first theoretical work by an avowed homosexual in France. The book influenced a whole generation of gay liberationists in Europe (and when brought out in the United States two years later by Schocken Books, many American gay intellectuals as well). The FHAR, which had strong anarchist tendencies, imploded by the end of that year, as its meetings were overwhelmed by those who came only for sex, not debate. But Hocquenghem--with his "angelic beauty," his assured platform performances and his gifted pen--had become, as Martel puts it, "a hero," "for many...the one who had 'liberated homosexuals'" and "the emblem of homosexuality in France."

The FHAR was not the first organization of French queers. Arcadie was an austere "homophile" review founded in 1954 by an ex-seminarian, André Baudry; as it gained subscribers, it gradually became a discreet movement, a kind of secretive homo Freemasonry dominated by ultramontane Catholics. Baudry preached "sublimating one's sexual and emotional orientation into asceticism," and he opened Arcadie's parties and dinners with sermons attacking homosexuals who cruised parks and toilets. It was supported by the likes of Jean Cocteau and the right-wing novelist and diplomat Roger Peyrefitte; its members included lawyers, magistrates, military men and government officials--all deeply closeted. But it did conduct the first dialogue with mainstream politicians on behalf of same-sexers and was not without influence. Martel's chapter on Arcadie, "Down with Daddy's Homosexuality" (a FHAR slogan), is fine gay historiography.

One of the few prominent leftists to join Arcadie was Jean-Louis Bory. A member of the French Resistance who fought in the Orléans forest in World War II, in 1945 Bory won the Prix Goncourt for his first novel at the age of 26. A socialist, Bory signed the famous appeal of the 121 writers and intellectuals calling for resistance to France's repressive war in Algeria in the 1950s. Over the years he published a series of novels in which "the latent homosexuality of his characters became increasingly clear," and in 1973 he wrote an unambiguous confessional autobiography. A year before the FHAR's founding Bory had "participated in the first mass-audience radio broadcast" on homosexuality, on which "he rejected any idea of a 'homosexual movement' but defended the fight for freedom, declaring that he was obviously a homosexual and a 'model citizen,' and that the two were necessarily linked in his mind." Bory mistrusted the radical aggressive visibility championed by Hocquenghem, but as a fixture on radio and TV in the 1970s he championed the homosexuals' "right to indifference." In 1977 Bory and Hocquenghem jointly published a book in which they outlined their differing views, later summed up by the philosopher René Schérer, Hocquenghem's friend and mentor: "[Bory] was living within the logic of Arcadie and was fighting for integration and tolerance, whereas Guy always insisted on marginality: he wanted integration with exceptionality, integration within marginality."

Exhausted by his role as the "responsible left's" gay spokesman, Bory committed suicide in 1979. Hocquenghem left organized politics altogether and became well known as a journalist, essayist, novelist and broadcaster, teaching all the while. Since Martel makes him such a central figure throughout the book, it's unfortunate there is no more than a cursory and often reductionist presentation of his thought (for an overview in English, see Bill Marshall's Guy Hocquenghem: Beyond Gay Identity, from Duke University Press).

I have emphasized the early years of French gay politics because they are so little known here, but there's much more in Martel's book, which--dare I say it?--doesn't miss a trick. There are chapters on the changing loci of gay male cruising and gay nightlife; a rich chapter detailing the history of lesbians, whose struggle for identity was primarily within the women's movement, not the gay movement; on the ultimately successful effort to repeal the various laws criminalizing homosexuality, of which France was free from the French Revolution (as of 1793) until Vichy; on the rise and fall of the weekly Gai Pied and other organs of the political gay press; on the contribution gays made to the victory of François Mitterrand and the Socialists in 1981--and their subsequent disillusionment; on the retreat from militancy in the 1980s, the triumph of gay commercialism, the gay ghetto.

But the most impassioned chapters in the book are devoted to AIDS. Martel writes that in the early '80s, gay intellectuals, militants, organizations and the gay press were largely in denial about the threat of AIDS. Even the association of gay doctors was in denial. After Michel Foucault died of the disease in 1984, his partner of twenty-three years, Daniel Defert, and a group of friends launched the association Aides, with two goals: prevention education and care for the sick. The heroic loneliness of Defert and his colleagues as they battled the epidemic is as moving as the refusals they met with in the gay world are appalling. Why was organized gay life in France virtually last in Western Europe to respond effectively to AIDS? The sociologist Michel Setbon has argued that "AIDS as a problem specific to homosexuals placed [gay] organizations on the horns of a dilemma that was painful, if not impossible, to address," given the state of medical knowledge at the time: "Either adopt the epidemiological definition of AIDS as a 'gay cancer' and risk being stigmatized, or deny its reality and avoid homophobia."

The analytical theses at the end of Martel's book, which were widely criticized in the French gay press, may remind American readers of the attacks on the gay movement emanating from the Independent Gay Forum, the network of conservative gay intellectuals founded by the likes of The New Republic's Andrew Sullivan and the National Journal's Jonathan Rauch. Moreover, a condescending bitterness creeps into Martel's tone when writing about liberationist militants, which his assimilationist and reformist politics do not fully explain. When I raised this with Martel, he told me that one of those to whom he dedicates the book, at the time his 18-year-old lover, had been "infected with HIV by a militant." Pity he didn't tell his readers.

I lived in France for much of the '80s and knew a number of the people in this book--Hocquenghem was a valued friend--and find serious factual errors in Martel's work. He writes that Hocquenghem "refused to be tested" for AIDS and "reportedly learned he was HIV-positive only after he was already ill. He supposedly even refused...to be monitored medically." These unsourced statements are entirely false, as Guy's lover and literary executor, the journalist Roland Surzur (who took the test with him), confirmed to me. Martel attacks Hocquenghem for blindly writing as late as September 1985, "How can we believe in a medical establishment that discourages us, that announces nothing but contagion, that marches only to the tune of fear and despair?" These words appear shocking--unless one knows they were written two months after Hocquenghem tested positive, which gives them an entirely different meaning. The first group to emerge from the gay community to fight the epidemic was not Aides, as Martel writes, but Vaincre le Sida, founded by an ex-FHAR activist, Dr. Patrice Meyer. I've discovered other errors and inexactitudes too numerous to list here. Many of those Martel attacks are no longer here to defend themselves; Hocquenghem died of AIDS in 1988.

I think Setbon's view is the right one: Fear of homophobia was the principal cause of AIDS denial in France. But Martel believes the fault lies elsewhere: with "identity politics." He doubts "the advisability of building a political community of homosexuals" and calls for an abandonment of "communitarianism." Yet he was hired as a counselor on gay issues by two Socialist governments precisely because the community, and the gay vote, had become important. And in a democracy, all electoral politics is, to one degree or another, based on the politics of identity.

In the late 1970s, the legendary Socialist Gaston Defferre--mayor of Marseilles for decades and his party's onetime presidential candidate--took a number of real and symbolic steps in favor of same-sexers. Asked to explain this, the leader of the city's organized gays later said, "Defferre's success came from the fact that he always had his Armenians, his Greeks.... When there got to be queers, he had his queers." To get so big they try to co-opt you is half the battle; the other half, harder, is to resist.

I have long embraced the proposition that homosexuals are different from everyone else except in bed--it is oppression and fear that makes them so. Martel insists that "we must do our best to make 'homosexuality' a meaningless term, a word with no relation to reality. Only ever-changing individuals must remain." A noble sentiment--but I'm afraid I think that day is further away, much further away, than he does.

A woman two months pregnant goes to see her Ob-Gyn for prenatal care. As required by law, her doctor informs her that her condition places her at greater risk for a wide range of medical problems: hypertension and diabetes if she is overweight; complications of surgery if, like one in four women, she has a Caesarean section; permanent weight gain with its attendant problems, including heart disease; urinary tract infections and prolapsed uterus if she has had multiple pregnancies; postpartum depression or psychosis, leading in rare cases to suicide or infanticide; not to mention excruciating childbirth pain, stretch marks and death. There are ominous social possibilities, too, the doctor continues, reading from his state-supplied script: increased vulnerability to domestic violence; being or becoming a single mother, with all the struggles and poverty that entails; job and housing discrimination; the curtailment of education and professional training; and lowered income for life.

No state legislature would compel doctors to confront patients with the statistical risks of childbearing, serious though they are; a doctor who did so on his own would strike many as intrusive, offensive and out of his mind. Should a woman seek abortion, however, anti-choicers are pushing state laws requiring that she be informed of a risk most experts do not believe exists: a link between abortion and breast cancer. Like the supposedly widespread psychological trauma of abortion, which even anti-choice Surgeon General Dr. C. Everett Koop was unable to find evidence of, the abortion-breast cancer connection is being aggressively promoted by the anti-choice movement. (Even Mother Jones, always quick to take feminists down a peg, leapt on this bandwagon, with an April/May 1995 piece entitled "Abortion's Risk.")

"It's yet another example of efforts to encumber this legal choice and make it more difficult and painful for women," says Dr. Wendy Chavkin, professor of public health and clinical obstetrics and gynecology at New York's Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, and editor in chief of the Journal of the American Medical Women's Association. It's also an attempt by anti-choicers to reframe their opposition to abortion as concern for women's health, something not usually high on their list. These are, after all, the same people who fight health exceptions to "partial birth" abortion bans and who have successfully prevented poor women from receiving medically necessary abortions with Medicaid funds.

Nonetheless, such is the power of the anti-choice movement that laws have been passed in Montana and Mississippi, and bills are pending in fifteen other states, mandating a breast cancer warning (and in some cases, a waiting period for it to sink in). Along with laws come lawsuits: In Fargo, North Dakota, the Red River Women's Clinic is being sued for failing to give such a warning; a 19-year-old Pennsylvania woman is suing a New Jersey clinic for her abortion two years ago, which left her, she claims, with an overwhelming fear of contracting breast cancer. In ferociously anti-choice Louisiana, a new law permits women to sue for damages--including damages to the fetus!--up to ten years after their abortion. Given today's high rates of breast cancer, a deluge of litigation is in the making.

Does abortion cause breast cancer? Some studies have appeared to suggest a connection: Dr. Janet Daling, for example, an epidemiologist who says she is pro-choice, compared the abortion histories of 1,800 women with and without breast cancer and found that, among those who had been pregnant at least once, the risk of breast cancer was 50 percent higher for those who had abortions--but her cancer-free sample was obtained through telephone interviews with women chosen at random from the phone book. Not everyone has a phone, of course, which raises questions about the comparability of the samples, and besides, how many women would volunteer information about their abortion history to a voice on the phone? Like other studies showing a link, this one was marred by "recall bias": Cancer patients are more likely to volunteer negative information about themselves than healthy people. They are looking for an explanation for a disease--and one many feel must somehow be their fault. Demographic studies, which are free from recall bias, produce different results: Lindefors Harris, analyzing the national medical database of Swedish women in 1989, found that women did deny their abortions, that breast cancer patients were less likely to do so--and that women who had had abortions were less likely to get breast cancer. The largest study to date, of 1.5 million Danish women, found no correlation.

"The supposed link between breast cancer and abortion is motivated by politics, not medicine," says Dr. David Grimes, clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of North Carolina. "The weight of the evidence at this time indicates no association. To force this on women is just cruel." Indeed, the National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society and the World Health Organization, none of which have an ax to grind, reject the notion. The standard medical textbook, Diseases of the Breast, concurs. The main figure advocating the link is Dr. Joel Brind, professor of biology and endocrinology at Baruch College, who has done no original research on this issue but is a tireless anti-choice propagandist--plug "abortion breast cancer" into a search engine and the top half dozen sites are his.

Abortion is just about the only medical procedure in which doctors and patients are hemmed about by lawmakers. No other operation has legally mandated waiting periods, although many are dangerous, life-altering and irreversible; with no other operation are doctors legally required to give specific information--certainly not information that the vast preponderance of medical opinion believes to be false or at best unproven. Good medical practice calls for discussion of the pros and cons of particular courses of treatment, not burdening the patient's choice with unsubstantiated fears. Will we ever see a law requiring doctors to tell pregnant patients that abortion is statistically safer than carrying to term--which it is? Sure, the day state lawmakers put a waiting period on Viagra prescriptions, to let male patients really consider whether an erection is worth a heart attack.

Will Paris become the first large city in France (indeed, the first major city or national capital anywhere in the world) to elect an openly gay candidate as mayor--the Socialist Bertrand Delanoë? Beyond that question, highly symbolic for same-sexers everywhere, the two-stage Paris elections, which take place on March 11 and 18, will have far-reaching consequences. If the left succeeds in winning the City of Light for the first time ever, that could presage a national victory in France's presidential and legislative elections, to be held in May 2002.

The right has maintained hegemony in Paris since the first municipal elections in 1977, when Jacques Chirac--then president of the neo-Gaullist RPR--led the right to victory. He remained mayor of Paris until his election as President in 1995, when he dictated the selection of his successor--the current mayor, Jean Tiberi, Chirac's first deputy mayor for nearly two decades.

But the unbroken succession in this city, dominated for the past twenty-four years by la droite chiraquienne (the Chirac conservative majority), has suddenly and dramatically deteriorated following an avalanche of financial and electoral scandals. Mayor Tiberi is at the center of accusations concerning, among other things, the secret financing of political parties through a highly organized system of corrupt rakeoffs and kickbacks on contracts, filling the electoral rolls with phantom voters, illegally allocating low-rent apartments in city-owned housing (reserved for the economically disadvantaged) to political cronies and the families of elected officials and giving hundreds of no-show municipal jobs to full-time workers for the RPR and its campaigns. These scandals now threaten to undo Chirac himself, a danger underscored by the recent arrest of Chirac's former municipal chief of staff.

Aside from the scandals, the right's management of the city has also been sharply criticized. Paris is in danger of becoming a city-museum: Rents have skyrocketed, and the lack of subsidized housing for low- and middle-income families has forced many of them to move to less costly suburban developments with onerous commutes. While tourism continues to increase, Paris has serious air pollution and has not modernized or improved its public transportation or its noncommercial recreation facilities (especially for the young, hardest hit by unemployment).

All this means the left has an excellent chance of winning the municipal elections. Its leading candidate, Dominique Strauss-Kahn (number two in Prime Minister Lionel Jospin's government and the man in charge of the French economy), was forced to withdraw and lost his ministry after being tainted by yet another money scandal. After much internecine maneuvering, Jospin's Socialist Party finally settled on Delanoë. A little-known senator at the time of his designation, with a reputation as an unimaginative apparatchik and Jospin loyalist, Delanoë chose to make his homosexuality public during a 1998 television appearance. His matter-of-fact manner in coming out made few waves at the time, but since then he has enjoyed the media's favor, and--thanks to the Ubuesque situation in which Paris's right finds itself--his popularity has steadily increased in the opinion polls. And he has secured the endorsement of all the smaller parties in Jospin's "plural left" coalition, including the Communists (except for the Greens, who are nonetheless expected to support Delanoë in the second round of municipal voting). Within the city's sizable gay population, Delanoë has broad support, all the more so because, in contrast to his right-wing opponents, he has been a supporter of the pact of civil solidarity (PACS) for unmarried couples. Passed by the left-controlled National Assembly in 1999, the PACS recognizes and gives a large number of social and fiscal rights to domestic partnerships, whether homo- or heterosexual.

The conservative RPR, recognizing that Tiberi was politically bankrupt, dropped him as its mayoral candidate in favor of Philippe Séguin, a former party president and minister under Chirac. But even though Séguin is an RPR heavyweight with a reputation for intellectual honesty, his rigidity and independence (in the past he's feuded with Chirac) render him unsuited for the kinds of concessions necessary to unify the fractious Paris right. Meanwhile Mayor Tiberi, despite being disavowed by the RPR, has maintained his candidacy for re-election as an independent and is running a slate of candidates for City Council. In addition, the two extreme-right parties are running their own slates.

Delanoë's ambitious campaign proposals include making Paris "a model of democracy" (through the creation of neighborhood and youth councils and an official forum for civic organizations, the institution of referendums by petition and, above all, a guarantee of "real financial transparency" in government); building 5,000 new low-income and student housing units a year; ending the policy of "autos first" by building a new tramway to encircle Paris, creating 300 kilometers of new bus lanes, more car-free zones for pedestrians, cyclists and roller skaters, and improved river transport on the Seine; providing more daycare centers and facilities for the aged and handicapped; and doubling the city's cultural budget. He also promises halfway houses for gay kids rejected by their parents, giving gay organizations equal access to the subsidies the city already provides to civic groups, creating a new gay archive/research center and waging aggressive city-sponsored campaigns against antigay discrimination and AIDS.

However, even if Delanoë wins, as now seems probable, giving Paris back its former demographic mixture and improving its quality of life--especially for those of modest means--won't be easy, given a city budget that has been fiscally unsound for many years. Moreover, Delanoë's personal shortcomings continue to raise doubts, including on the left: Can a party workhorse with no management experience, nominated almost by default for his mayoral post, innovatively lead the first city of France?

Still, changing the political control of Paris--and ending what Le Nouvel Observateur has dubbed "the corrupt Chirac-Tiberi system"--is a top priority, one that could lead to the right's (and Chirac's) defeat next year. And if this permits one of the world's greatest cities to elect a mayor who is openly gay, why not gamble on his success? Frédéric Martel

We have many male authors known for loving women, fewer known for loving men. Love that is not overtly homoerotic--resolutely heterosexual, in fact--can take on an intimacy and purity untroubled by sex, even if still troubling for its intensity, its incoherence and frequent confusion, violence or aggression, its exclusionary quality. And so it is no surprise to find it so often in novels of war, or the military. In the last half-century American practitioners of this form have included Heller and Mailer, Ward Just, Tim O'Brien and, perhaps most overlooked, James Salter, who is interested in more than the camaraderie among men in uniform but also its inverse as well, the case of the solitary, perhaps a newcomer breaking in. Here is his description of the fighter pilot Robert Cassada from his new novel of that name:

It was his beauty, of course, a beauty that no one saw--they were blind to such a thing.... By beauty, nothing obvious is meant. It was an aspect of the unquenchable, of the martyr, but this quality had its physical accompaniment. His shoulders were luminous, his body male but not hard, his hair disobedient. Few of them had seen him naked, not that he concealed himself or was modest but like some animal come to drink he was solitary and unboisterous. He was intelligent but not cerebral and could be worshipful, as in the case of airplanes.

"They" and "them" are his colleagues, the men of a fighter squadron stationed in Germany in the 1950s. The men--Dunning, Isbell, Wickenden, Godchaux, Phipps, Dumfries, Ferguson, Harlan, Grace--lead restless, incurious, exalted lives, flying every day in the skies above Western Europe, waiting for the conflict that never comes. So conflict comes from within and among the men, who are arrogant, competitive, bored, cussedly suspicious yet trusting, too. They are not alike. Major Dunning is a Southerner and former college football star; Harlan is a rustic, an overgrown farm boy. Wickenden, or "Wick the prick," Cassada's nemesis, was "born in the wrong century. The cavalry was what he was made for, riding in the dust of the Mexican border with cracked lips and a line edged into his hair from the strap of a campaign hat." Cassada is from Puerto Rico, which leads Harlan to wonder what he's doing in the US Air Force. "Puerto Rico's part of the United States," replies Godchaux.

"Since when?"

"I don't know. A long time."

"I must of missed hearing about it."

The banter may not recall Catch-22--while sharp, it is seldom witty--but Salter's particular genius is for the inexpressive man. He saves his tenderest regard for Cassada, about whom there is "an elegance...a superiority. You did not find it often." It is perhaps his gravest mistake, for to a reader with less invested in the project, Cassada is the least present, most flattened out, of all the men, the one who never steps out of the page despite being so beautiful or unforgettable as all that. Cassada, which is a revision of an early, out-of-print novel, The Arm of Flesh, should instead be titled Isbell.

In interviews Salter has dismissed The Arm of Flesh as a "failed book," and he says the same in his preface to Cassada. Admitting that the new venture might be "a mistake," he cites "the appeal of the period, the 1950s, barely a decade after the war; the place, the fighter bases of Europe; and the life itself." Cassada, then--in words that I have seen repeated in every notice--is "the book the other might have been."

I think in fact it is the same book, although better turned out for some crucial changes. The Arm of Flesh is a novel in alternating voices--seventeen altogether--some of which are hard to figure out, others appearing only briefly, even once. Several could be cut entirely, as their narrative distracts from the general thread, which is about the ordeal of two pilots (one whose radio is out) trying to make it home in terrible weather, while interspersed are episodes from lazy days on base and elsewhere. Cassada is told in the third person, but the structure is much the same--if the two books are laid side by side, one sees in Cassada a succession of loose little chapters that more or less correspond to an individual voice's narrative in The Arm of Flesh. Major Clyde is now Dunning. Lieutenant Sisse from the earlier book does not appear at all in the second. In The Arm of Flesh Cassada never speaks with his own voice. In both works his words are reported to us through the perspective of others; and so he is always at least once, often twice, removed from a reader.

"Something was usually beginning before the last thing ended." This is Isbell, and the words seem to me to be the key to the book. Cassada is a new arrival at the wing in Giebelstadt, but the rivalries, the ennui, the excitements of a life in the air, at speed, have been going on as long as men have been assembled to fight. Salter, who was a pilot himself in Korea--with the advantage, unlike many of the pilots in Cassada, of actually having seen combat--has written of this elsewhere, in his first novel, The Hunters, and in his memoir Burning the Days. A pilot, it seems, becomes obsessed with doing something remarkable, with being remembered and spoken about even after he's gone. "In the end there is a kind of illness," Salter writes in his memoir. "A feeling of inconsequence, even lightness, takes hold. It is, in a way, like the earliest days, the sense of being an outsider. Others are taking one's place, nameless others who can never know how it was." Cassada is driven relentlessly to prove himself; his immediate commander, Wickenden, thinks he has a death wish. Isbell, who grows to love Cassada, acknowledges his own part in stirring him up. "It was true [he] had sometimes opposed him. It had been essential to. It was part of the unfolding." Earlier we have learned of Isbell's mysticism, his sense of his role among the men as "biblical." "It was the task of Moses--he would take them to within sight of what was promised, but no further. To the friezes of heaven, which nobody knew were there."

In this kind of outfit, Cassada never stands a chance. It is he who is one of the pilots in trouble as they try to reach home. The other is Isbell. The bond between the two is the strangest in the book, yet critical to its success. I don't think Salter has convinced us that it is true. Isbell is decent, perceives Cassada's isolation; pencils himself in to fly with him once, on an early morning training mission over Germany. It is a matchless day, the kind fliers dream of. They hardly speak.

The earth lay immense and small beneath them, the occasional airfields white as scars. Down across the Rhine. The strings of barges, smaller than stitches. The banks of poplar. Then a city, glistening, struck by the first sun. Stuttgart. The thready streets, the spires, the world laid bare.

Afterward Isbell's body is "empty," his mind "washed clean." Cassada asks about a city they flew over, Ingolstadt. "It's not as great as it was this morning," Isbell replies.

"You could say that about everyplace," he commented.
It was true, Isbell thought, exactly. He felt a desire to reply in kind. It was not often you found anyone who could say things.

It is worth reprinting Salter's original language from The Arm of Flesh. The speaker is Isbell:

"The whole world's like that," he said.
A chance remark that entered my heart. I didn't know what to say. Suddenly he was not what he seemed--as wise as a schoolboy who knows sex--he was entirely different. Yes, I thought. The whole world is. And early we rise to discover the earth. I felt a sudden desire to bequeath him my dreams, to offer them up. All of the searching is only for someone who can understand them.

This seems to me rather better, nearly perfect, in fact. While terseness can suggest all the things that must remain unspoken in life, a writer striking at the essence of character must occasionally open himself up, like a pilot his engines. Earlier in the same passage, in The Arm of Flesh, we have the measure of Isbell that is stripped from its revision in Cassada--excitable, aroused, ready for risk: the risk of loving a fellow flier: "We stealthy two. Streaming like princes. Breathing like steers," he thinks while aloft. Over Stuttgart:

Watch out, Stuttgart. Watch out. We're at God's empty window. We can see everything. The thready streets. The spires. It's all apparent. We can stare through the roofs. Right into the first cups of coffee. Your warm secrets, Stuttgart. Your rumpled beds.

None of this is in Cassada. None of it says much about Cassada, but it says everything about Isbell. The end of the chapter is the same in both books, except for the following sentences from The Arm of Flesh: "He could have told me what he was going to be. I might have believed him." And later on, when the two men's mission has met its tragic end, a lengthy Isbell monologue is sharply cut, in which his obsession with Cassada again comes to the fore: "There is so much I almost told him. I can't understand why I didn't. I was waiting for something, a word that would fall, an unguarded act." Of course, there are no unguarded acts from the embattled Cassada, but more surprising is the sense--retained in Cassada--that the young pilot actually had something to say. Both versions ascribe uniqueness to him, the phrase "the sum of our destinies." Yet Cassada doesn't even pretend to understand Isbell in those moments when their communion is said to be greatest: "You amaze me, Captain.... We're talking about two different things. I don't know. I just don't understand, I guess."

In Burning the Days--the eponymous chapter of which, thirty pages long, is a true anticipation of the story told in The Arm of Flesh and Cassada--Salter invokes briefly a pilot named Cortada: "He was from Puerto Rico, small, excitable, and supremely confident. Not everyone shared his opinion of his ability--his flight commander was certain he would kill himself."

And that's it for Cortada. Another cipher, with too much in common with Cassada to be a coincidence. Salter has kept the story of both men to himself, which is why a reader turns more attentively to the lonely and appealing Captain Isbell, standing between the men and Major Dunning. It is no surprise, of course. Failing to attach ourselves to the protagonist for whom the book is named, we look elsewhere, and find our longing met in the author's substitute.

The end of Cassada is beautiful. It is only four pages. Isbell and his family are leaving Germany; they are on a train along the Rhine, his daughters rambunctious, his wife solicitous, Isbell alone with his thoughts, which include Cassada. For the first time he senses himself as the romantic figure readers have seen all along, joining the ranks of the eternals, "the failed brother, the brilliant alcoholic friend, the rejected lover, the solitary boy who scorned the dance." Isbell is Salter; and one turns to Burning the Days, where the author takes his own solitary farewell to the flying life:

When I returned to domestic life I kept something to myself, a deep attachment--deeper than anything I had known--to all that had happened. I had come very close to achieving the self that is based on the risking of everything, going where others would not go, giving what they would not give. Later I felt I had not done enough, had been too reliant, too unskilled. I had not done what I set out to do and might have done. I felt contempt for myself, not at first but as time passed, and I ceased talking about those days, as if I had never known them. But it had been a great voyage, the voyage, probably, of my life.

"I would have given anything, I remember that," Salter adds, remembering the pilot's terror ("none of it mattered"), including separation from his leader. Isbell mouths nearly those words in remembering a Cassada who "stands before him, fair-haired, his small mouth and teeth, young, unbeholden." In Burning the Days Salter recalls a beloved figure from West Point who fell in the war: "He had fallen and in that act been preserved, made untarnishable. He had not married. He had left no one...he represented the flawless and was the first of that category to disappear."

Reading Salter's memoir, or recollection, as he prefers to call it, one senses that much of his life has been a mourning. The list of the dead is long and unfolds over pages and pages--many are pilots, men Salter flew with--and it becomes easy to see what he hopes is evident from his preface to Cassada: "the fact that it was sometimes the best along with the worst pilots who got killed." All of Salter's novels--including The Hunters, A Sport and a Pastime and Light Years--are beautiful elegies in which a survivor tries to go on, somehow make sense of it all, knowing the task is futile but that perhaps peace can be achieved. Why should his memoir be any different? Cassada will take a few hours to read, in which time there is exquisite suspense, some lovely sentences, a tender portrait of a hero--Isbell, I still believe, not Cassada--and a lot of shoptalk about flying. But the flying talk is better, more exactly described and sustained, more rapturous--"exalted," to use a favorite Salter word--in Burning the Days, and the memoir has the advantage of tracking the two held-apart strands of Salter's emotional life--the chaste love of men, the unsatiable desire for women--more closely than is possible for a book about fighter pilots. The following sentence sounds like Isbell recalling Cassada, but in fact it's Salter standing in the wreckage of all who have died: "You are surviving, more than surviving: their days have been inscribed on yours."